I spent most of yesterday trying to finish up the first draft of a short story that really needed to be done.  I'm discovering, though, that I need frequent breaks when I'm spending long days at the writing mill.  I've never really noticed this during my NaNoWriMo sprints, I suppose because I can generally crank out my daily words in one or two sessions.  But now that I've moved to much longer days of concentrated writing time, I've found a difference.

Yesterday I thought I'd take a  break from one kind of creativity by switching to another, but I needed to set some boundaries so that I wouldn't get swept away and forget to go back to the writing.  Therefore I made it a time challenge, too.  I decided I would open up Photoshop and give myself twenty minutes to create a desktop wallpaper.  One other rule:  I had to work with only the brush sets I happened to have open, plus one other I could choose.

It was fun and provided a good break.  The result isn't terribly fancy, but I like it and it's on my desktop now.  Here it is:


I titled it "Sister Moon."

For Christmas, hubby gave me a new packet of artist trading cards.  I think I might start a few of those to work on when I take a timed break, too.  The switch from one creative endeavour to another seems to have been better for me than using the time on something more mundane.
The image on the right is a thing of beauty. :)

Having started the month of November flat on my back and in pain with a slipped disc, there were times when I thought I might not get to say "I did it!" this year. However, with the help of the voice recognition software, it worked out. At 50k words, I'm maybe halfway through this novel, and I quite like it so far. I'm setting a tentative date of January 15th to try and finish the first draft. With Christmas in the offing that would usually be unrealistic, but the silver lining of my slipped disc experience is this: my shopping is 90% finished. Knowing I likely would not be very mobile even by December, I interspersed my novel-writing with online shopping and have arrived at this enviable place.

It's too bad I can't be in this place without major health interventions, but I'll take what I can get.

June 2017

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